Kingston – A woman who made disparaging comments about her landlord on her Internet blog has become the latest person to discover what can happen when cyberspace and legal realities collide.
Sarah Dawe is facing eviction for her postings related to an ongoing dispute with Homestead Land Holdings Inc.
Ms. Dawe says she was stunned to find herself on the receiving end of such an action.
"When I got the (eviction) notice, I went into a panic, I couldn't eat or sleep for four days," said Ms. Dawe who is fighting the eviction order.
"Blogs are personal diaries. Anyone can read them, but with mine, except for people trolling or spamming, I was probably the only one reading it."
Whatever the readership, libel lawyers and technology watchers say as more people use the Internet, the number of people getting in trouble for electronic words whether on websites and blogs, e-mails or electronic bulletin boards is also rising.
A train driver with Via Rail resigned from his job of 30 years after the company gathered postings he made to a satirical magazine's website over a three-month period – on his own time with his own computer – and began dismissal proceedings against him.
A stay-at-home mother in Waterloo, Ont., was slapped with a $2-million libel suit from a property developer after she posted pictures of what she said were unsafe construction practices at a development near her home.
And just last month, a Saskatchewan math professor who anonymously skewered his colleagues on a popular site allowing students to rate their professors lost a bid to get his job back after being fired for those comments.
The technology may be new but the law isn't.
"It's as though this person was putting up flyers or putting them under people's doors," said Toronto lawyer David Potts, who specializes in the fast-growing field known as "cyberlibel."
"It seems new because it's out in the ether, but cyberlibel is just a form of information warfare."
Marc-Andre Blanchard of Gowling Lafleur Henderson said such cases are more prevalent, particularly in labour law, where collective agreements may make it difficult for a company to sue an employee they consider to be slandering them.
But that doesn't prevent disciplinary action.
"It's more and more common in labour relations," Mr. Blanchard said, noting that many of the cases go unpublicized because the processes are rarely public.
However, he said firing an employee based on their Internet postings on their own time is "extraordinary."
The Via Rail driver was Dan Christie of Port Hope, Ont., a self-identified "whistleblower" who, between March 1 and May 15, 2004, wrote about turmoil inside Via Rail under a pseudonym on the Frank Magazine website.
At the time, Via was being rocked by its role in the sponsorship scandal and its president had publicly denigrated Olympian Miriam Bedard.
Mr. Christie wrote about the turmoil within the corporation and what he felt was its mismanagement.
The company ordered him to provide a "formal employee statement" about his comments.
Mr. Christie, who had 30 years on the job, chose to resign rather than fight a protracted disciplinary action.
"For anyone seeing this stuff from within Via, it was a fantastic waste of money," he said of his motives.
"We were working for a Crown corporation, a de facto arm of the government, and do we not have a chance to complain about how our tax dollars are being spent, even if they're being spent on us?"
He said he knew he was being provocative, but said none of his Internet comments contained anything that could be deemed illegal, such as exhorting people to commit illegal acts.
"I was venting the frustration of people who were working there and who were not being able to serve the public the way we wanted to," he said.
Mr. Christie said he was shocked to discover that Via was apparently tracking and collecting his posts for use against him, and speculated the company wanted to send a message.
"There was an implicit chill that you'd shut up or you'd lose your job, and that's what happened in my case," he said.
That area sometimes known as reputation management is also a growing field and is taken seriously enough that many large companies have staff or outside firms tracking what is being said about them, and often their competitors, on the Internet.
Corporations also register so-called "sucks" websites – typically the company's name followed by that word – to stop people from owning it and posting criticism of the company, either in a boycott of it or to ransom the company into buying the domain from them in order to take it down.
One of the reasons people tend to get away with more on the Internet than they ever would in a traditional printed form is that statements can be published electronically for no cost, but hiring a lawyer to pursue a claim is not free.
The person being sued may also have little money as he or she is not a major media conglomerate, lawyers point out.
"It's seldom worth it to chase these people down because at the end of the day, there ain't anything there," said Randy Pepper, a partner with Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and a veteran litigator in the areas of defamation and misleading advertising.
However, he said there's an indication that courts may start awarding high damages for online material determined to be defamatory because of its broad potential readership.
Unlike a newspaper or a television broadcast, something on the Internet is available to anyone in the world.
While a definitive court definition of what constitutes "broadcasting" has yet to be made, anyone posting anything anywhere on the Internet can be considered to be a broadcaster, unlike a decade ago when it was restricted to TV and radio stations holding a government licence.
Lawyers also say people posting on the Internet may think they are anonymous when, in fact, they are anything but. That perceived cloak of anonymity leads them to post opinions that they would never put in a signed letter to the editor, for example.
But given the amount of material on the Internet that could be considered libellous, only a tiny percentage ever becomes the target of legal action, said Roger McConchie, a Vancouver media lawyer with extensive experience in libel and Internet law.
"When it comes to what I would call unsophisticated publishers, which is what a lot of these individuals are, even if it's egregiously libel, as long as it's not egregiously malicious, they're not going to be chased to the ends of the earth," he said.
In Ms. Dawe's case, she said she thinks she has done nothing wrong and won't take down her website.
"If they had a legitimate legal reason for getting me to shut down the blog I would, but they don't," the Kingston resident said. "It would be like cutting off my nose to spite my face."
